It’s a beautiful day for a neighbor, and for over thirty-two years, Fred McFeeley Rogers was the kind of neighbor every parent trusted with their children. Born in 1928 in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, Fred Rogers was the only child of James and Nancy Rogers until he was eleven years old, at which point his younger sister was born. Developing an interest in music at a very young age, that interest would drive Rogers to get his bachelor’s degree in music composition from Rollins College in 1951.

Rogers married his college sweetheart, Sara, in 1952, and the couple had two sons together. In 1963, he earned a degree from seminary school, and throughout the course of his life would go on to earn more than forty honorary degrees in a variety of subjects.

Following his passion for music, Rogers earned his first job in television working as a music producer for NBC, but eventually decided that the commercial reliance on advertising was not for him and he moved on to work for public television as a puppeteer on a children’s program called The Children’s Corner, where he developed personalities and voices for a variety of puppets that would later appear on his own series, Mr.

Rogers’ Neighborhood.

Mister Rogers first appeared on Canadian television after a Toronto station offered him his own children’s series. The series only lasted for three short seasons, after which point Rogers bought the rights and brought the show back to the States and the public access channel WQED.

During the thirty-two year run of Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood on public access television, Fred entered the studio and changed from his dress shoes into sneakers and slipped into a cardigan sweater before exploring a variety of activities designed to captivate and inspire children. He often took field trips to factories and regular visits to the land of Make-Believe via the “trolley.”

Devoting more than half of his life to the production of children’s television, it’s no wonder that in 1997, Rogers won the lifetime achievement Emmy. In 2003, Rogers died after battling stomach cancer, leaving behind a legacy that will likely entertain children and families for years to come. Nearly 900 episodes of Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood were filmed and aired during the span of his career, and to this day just over 300 of those episodes continually re-run on PBS channels all across the country.

Just about everyone can remember sharing Mr. Rogers friends and family, and it only takes a few hummed bars of the famous theme song in which Rogers pleaded with children all over the world, “Would you be mine? Could you be mine? Won’t you be my neighbor?” to set a nostalgic tone that takes you back to the land of Make-Believe.